October 06, 2016

Unsquare dance

Dave Brubeck is a famous Jazz musician and composer, most famous for the piece "Take 5". Brubeck is probably most famous for the fact that he tended to use strange time signatures, like 5/4 for Take 5.

Another of his pieces has the extremely clever (IMHO) name "Unsquare dance" which is in 7/4. And amazingly enough, it swings.

In 2001 when he was 80, that piece was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra with him as a guest. He had lost a lot of dexterity, so the main piano solo was performed by someone else, but he had a solo at the end.

The first soloist, a sax player, was truly outstanding. As soon as he started playing, I said, "Oh, yeah!"

But the most delightful thing of all is Brubeck's reaction to it all. He has a big grin the whole time and obviously is enjoying it enormously. Music is happiness (or can be) and this one is.

I don't link to music much but I ran into this a couple of days ago and couldn't pass it by.

3
Here's the Smoke On The Water cover. I dug it up again recently because I found a recent episode of the same show where they covered several well-known anime songs. Just the Western orchestra, though, not the tokiwazu group.

October 01, 2016

Vivid Strike -- ep 1

At first I didn't think that this was even in the same timeline as Nanoha Vivid, but after I
finished the first episode I came to the conclusion that it's the same timeline
but two or three years later.

And the story is about a
befriending that needs to happen. Of course. (The motto of this canon is
"Friendship through superior firepower".)

Filling in some gaps, I think what's going on is that Team Nakajima in the
course of two or three world tournaments has become a major name and gained lots
of fans and attention, because of the outstanding performance of Vivio, Einhart,
Rio, and Corona. Lots of people coming to them trying to join, and so Nove has
opened a gym, "Nakajima Gym", which includes basic exercise equipment
but also has martial arts training. Nove runs the place, and her star martial
arts team is Corona, Vivio, Einhart, Rio, and Miura. And Yumina Enclave, who
isn't a fighter, seems involved too.

(Miura moving over makes sense. As good as she's gotten she probably can't really train with the other students studying with Vita and Zafira. In Team Nakajima there are several who are at her level that she can reasonably train with.)

The main character is a girl named Fuuka. She's had a hard life, living in an
orphanage and living in the lower strata of society. She's learned to fight out
of self preservation. In the orphanage she had a friend named Rinne.

Rinne got adopted by a rich family, and she changed. She became cold and
dark, and no longer acted as if Fuka was her friend. Fuka, meanwhile, has grown
up and is trying to survive but is having a hard time doing so because she keeps
getting into fights, and keeps losing her jobs. In the most recent incident she
seems to have been fighting to save a couple of co-workers, and she got hurt
pretty badly.

Einhart is out running and finds her. Being mostly out of it, Fuka tries to
hit Einhart with a magically enhanced punch. Einhart blocks it but is impressed
by the power of the blow. Then Fuka passes out. One hospital scene later, and
Fuka being fired from her latest job, and the doctor gives her a note from
Einhart telling her to come visit the Nakajima gym.

So we get some angst (not much) and some back story, and some fighting, and
Fuka gets hired to work in the gym, in exchange for food and board and a bit of pocket money. And her job
is to be a sparring partner.

Rinne, meanwhile, has gotten extraordinarily good at martial arts and has a
record of 157 wins out of 158 matches. Her only loss was to Vivio in the most
recent tournament, and Einhart won the under 15 world championship. (There's
some confusion about this in the translation I watched. Both Einhart and Rinne
are described as the under-15 champion. I suspect that Rinne was the
champion but lost that title to Einhart in the most recent tournament.)

The series story is obvious: Fuka has to become strong enough to defeat
Rinne, and in so doing will revive their friendship. She's going to do that by
studying the Hegemon-stye with Einhart, evidently the first student Einhart has
taken in. And then she'll enter the world tournament and fight her way up the
ranks far enough to meet Rinne in the ring. (Or, maybe, fighting in the street in their old neighborhood. The ED is ambiguous about that; it shows them fighting in the street but it also shows them fighting in a ring.)

The ED has flashes of characters we know from Vivid: Victoria, Hallie, Sieg,
Els, Chantez, and Ixpellia, who is awake again and full-sized.

Based on the first episode I think it's going to be pretty good, at least for
a fan of the canon. No world crisis, nothing like that. But ultimately the real
story of every series in the canon is about befriending, and this one will be
true to that.

I think it's two years since Vivid. Yumina and Einhart are shown wearing the same school uniform as they wore in Vivid, when they were both first year middle school. So it can't be more than two years.

There are other hints. One is that Einhart wears a bra now... I don't think this is going to be a fan service show, but they give us a closeup. (Oh, dear.)

I went through and Google-translated the other character profiles and it seems like this takes place after the second tournament that they all enter. With a full year of training after the first one, they clearly all have improved a great deal, and they all do very, very well. (Like Vivio defeating Rinne and ending her undefeated winning streak.)

Anyway, it says that Yumina and Einhart are both second year middle school and Rio, Corona, and Vivio are all fifth grade. So this is probably about a year and a half after Vivid.

It is kind of subtle but all of them are wearing power-draining bands when Fuka fights them, so she's going to have a surprise coming when they fix her with a set.

Also, she doesn't know about Vivio and Einhart's adult modes.

I wonder who is going to make an intelligent device for her? My bet is that it will be Yumina.

Burton is, by this point, legendary for his films and for his unwillingness to cleave to any kind of genre. They may be spectacular or they may simply be weird, but they won't be remotely formula.

Just from the title and the brief description, it sounds like it was sold to the studio as being attractive to fans of Larry Potter -- and it probably will be. But it won't be a Potter-me-too because Burton doesn't do me-toos.

It's supposed to hit the theaters on Sep. 30, and it's almost enough to tempt me to go see a movie in a theater for the first time since "The Matrix". I probably won't, but I'm really looking forward to how people react to it.

Unless Burton really lets us down, it's going to be an event.

UPDATE: If the trailer is anything to judge by, Burton is on his game.

August 04, 2016

Playing Microsoft Casino is a bit strange now. It was published something like 15 years ago and it's one of the few timewasters I have that still work under Win 10.

And it contains advertising for Danny Gans and for Siegfried and Roy. Danny Ganz died in 2009, and Siegfried and Roy no longer perform after Roy was nearly killed by one of their lions. It's kind of eerie to see those.

The three casinos they feature are Treasure Island, Mirage, and the Bellagio, and when I used to visit Vegas I never went to any of those. I usually stayed at the Luxor. I tried the Rio Suites once, and the hotel was fine but the other guests there were horrible. The other guests at the Luxor were a lot nicer.

The three casinos in the game all used to belong to Steve Wyn but now they're MGM International. Apparently now MGM also owns the Luxor and, I presume, Excalibur and Mandalay Bay. I guess they own everything now.

Regardless, the game kind of preserves a moment in time in Las Vegas, but that time has well and truly come and gone. I don't know if that's good or bad. All I know is that it's unavoidable.

July 27, 2016

Incoming canon fire

Is this an indication that I'm hopelessly unhip, that I don't have the slightest idea who any of the people are, who are referred to in this comic?

I remember seeing the very first Star Wars movie a couple of days after it opened, before it became a Big Thing. It was on the big screen at the West Gate theater here in Beaverton (which no longer exists) and I was a cub engineer working my first full-time job at Tektronix.

When the Death Star exploded, the audience burst into applause. I've never heard anything like that before or since. And after I walked out of the theater, I wasn't at all surprised that it became a phenomenon. But that was nearly 40 years ago.

And now it's an entire canon -- and I don't know anything about it. Oh, well.

1
I recognize two of the names, because Timothy Zahn created them; I never had much use for most of the other Expanded Universe novels, except when I was desperate for a read and they were the only things in the grocery store at 3am.

2
Disney uncanonicalized the Expanded Universe, so technically you don't need to know who they all are.
However:
Mara Jade was the Emperor's Hand, an assassin, who married Luke. The Yuuzhan Vong were a race that invaded the galaxy 30 years after the end of Return of the Jedi in a 17-book series that massively changed the universe. They were responsible for the deaths of Chewbacca and two of Han and Leia's children. Not sure about the others.

5
The expanded universe was the collection of book, video games, and comic books in the "Star Wars" universe that had some form of official recognition from LucasArts. The most widely known are probably the first four books by Timothy Zahn, which are where we got Mara Jade and Admiral Thrawn, but the total number of books in the EU number in the hundreds by nearly that many authors. They were officially cast aside as no long canon when Episode VII was announced, but it was worded in such a way that many people speculated that some of the characters and events, such as Admiral Thrawn, would make their way over to canon, and now he has.
Of course, the real fun is the stuff that never qualified for Expanded Universe status. For example Splinter of the Mind's Eye, a book written before Episode V and VI came out, which had to be rather rapidly and quietly forgotten once we learned that Luke and Leia were siblings..

8
Technically there always was an expanded universe, just because Star Wars essentially pioneered the modern marketable franchise and had action figures for characters that didn't even have speaking lines in any of the movies.
The best of these, though, are the Timothy Zahn "Heir to the Empire" trilogy, that formed a very well-written story arc, that starts out just after the original trilogy left off, and deals head-on with more issues of "what happens when the rebellion succeeds?" than progressive minds are even capable of comprehending. Despite one annoying Mary Sue (the Mara Jade referenced in the Penny Arcade strip, who I guess can't be all bad because she's by far the most popular character Zahn wrote), all the original cast got their turn to shine, and none were ever strapped to an idiot ball just so Mara Sue could save them (which probably explains her popularity).
Generally when people refer to The Expanded Universe, they're either referring to the Zahn books, or something based on them in the usual fanwanky way.

Posted by: Tatterdemalian at July 27, 2016 08:56 PM (g2A9v)

9
The earliest Star Wars "canon" expanded universe was probably the role-playing game. West End created a lot of the things that are "facts" now, like the make and model of the Millennium Falcon, the manufacturers of R2-D2 and C-3PO and most of the other technology, and the first attempt to classify and sort force powers.

10
The cartoons by Disney are considered canon, which is why they were excited about Thrawn appearing in Rebels.

Posted by: muon at July 27, 2016 10:18 PM (IUHrD)

11
Honestly, although I read and enjoyed the entire Thrawn trilogy, I figured there was no way the series could go anywhere but downhill from there, so I never read any of the inevitable pile of sequels written after that.
Hearing some of the stuff that came later has made me quite happy with that decision. Mara Sue marries Luke Skywalker? Great, he probably got Force Cancer and died tragically young just months after, leaving only his unborn child Mara Enony Raven Way to carry his legacy.

When the line of Star Wars tie in novels was started, the line writers asked for a setting bible to work from. Lucas didn't supply one; instead, they were sent copies of the West End Games RPG, and told to use that.

I doubt this story is true since, many moons ago, I read an interview that was done with Timothy Zahn and he mentioned that when he was finally selected to write for Star Wars (Which required his agent, not Zahn, to submit his previous works to Lucasfilm Licensing.), he received a large story bible for his work, besides consultation with LFL. That seemed have been followed through-out the novel line, though LFL was very flexible about the writers they were willing to accept as long as they will willing to follow guidelines.

The story of West End Games and the Star Wars RPG (Especially the end, which could be witnessed by the world in almost real time, thanks to the Internet.), would be interesting by itself. Something that was nice was the set of sourcebooks which covered the Thrawn Trilogy, complete with pictures of scenes from the books.

Posted by: cxt217 at July 30, 2016 03:20 PM (TuhJ1)

14
I actually give more credit to the WEG story; mainly because all reports of any kind of source bible or even rough outlines contributed by Lucas or Lucasfilm have always been proven to be apocryphal. People have been searching for this compendious resources for decades now, and they keep ending up with a handful of notes scribbled on notebook paper. I *do* remember Zahn mentioning that he was directed to the Daley and Smith novels as examples of works Lucas had found acceptable. One gets the feeling that George Lucas wasn't actually all that involved in the process.

July 11, 2016

Toys for the new Ghostbusters film are already in
clearance, even though the film doesn't open for another four days.

On the other hand, it currently scores 77% (53 to 16) on Rotten
Tomatoes. Who's right?

We'll know for certain on Friday, but right now I'm inclined to trust the
people who are gambling money on it. The stores have put that stuff in clearance
because it isn't selling. So if I was a gambling man, I'd be betting against it.

I won't be seeing it, but that's no distinction. The last movie I watched in
a theater was "The Matrix". And I think that newest American movie I
watched at home (on optical disk) was "The Incredibles". Hollywood
lost me a long time ago. (It didn't help that I don't own a TV. I haven't missed
it, either. And when I had a TV, the last show I watched regularly was "Good Eats".)

3
Someone pointed out the huge gap between the score from all critics (78%) and the one from the top critics (48%). It's usually no more than 10%.

Posted by: muon at July 12, 2016 06:44 PM (IUHrD)

4
It's been about three weeks (when movies make most of their money), so here's what Box Office Mojo has. It's opening weekend was $46 million, dropping off about 50% every week. So far the domestic box office is $110 million and $52 million foreign. The production budget was $144 million. I've seen estimates of the marketing for $100-$140 million. Roughly half of the domestic and a quarter of the foreign box office goes back to the studio. So it has to make around $488-$564 million to break even. The director estimated $450-$500 million. Someone on the IMDB board thought the minimum was $400 million. The studio is looking at losses of tens of millions. If the domestic box office doesn't even match the production budget, it'll be considered a flop.

Posted by: muon at August 05, 2016 05:01 AM (IUHrD)

5
One of my two local theaters is still giving it one screen; the other is giving it one showing per day, at 9:30pm (so much for appealing to kids...). It'll probably be completely gone by next weekend.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali seems to be a better fit for the subject of extended hate from the progressive thinking community.

Mind you, a female adaptation of Gandhi would Indira: the story of a woman leader who sowed ethnic and religious hatred, started wars of aggression, destabilized neighbors, and was killed in her own garden because she did not bother to replace her bodyguard detail of some of the same co-religionists of the group she was inflicting hatred and strife on.

Posted by: cxt217 at August 09, 2016 06:12 PM (ST+OH)

11
I'm still waiting for Gandhi II. From the trailer it looked like a fun flick.

June 26, 2016

There's a story about a Japanese company who wanted to compete in the broadband market against Road Runner, so they licensed Woody Woodpecker for their competing mascot, and their advertising slogan was going to be "Get Woody, the Internet Pecker". According to the story (almost certain apocryphal) one of their American employees had to explain to them the slang meaning of "woody" and "pecker".

So Disney is bringing out Spielberg's movie, "The BFG". And even I, about as un-hip a person as you'll find, had as a first thought, "Wow! How fast does it fire?"

Probably not fast at all since it stands for "Big Friendly Giant", not "Big Fucking Gun".

2
I'm sure there was a long meeting in which someone pointed out the current usage, and Spielberg said "that's what the book's called, dammit". Never heard of it myself, but I wasn't reading children's books in 1982, and haven't spent much time around people who do.

2
Heck, most of my favorite juvenile SF novels basically aren't available in ANY form anymore. They were published in paperback on cheap, high acid paper, and have fallen into dust unless somebody somewhere carried out a very expensive archival preservation technique on a copy. Not everybody was a Heinlein, famous enough to have his works preserved.

And most of my 4k+ SF library, collected over a lifetime, got scattered when I moved down to SC. I'll probably never read most of those titles again. If it were even possible, it would take tens of thousands of dollars to reassemble that collection. I don't even still have the catalog I constructed on R base.

It's very depressing to realize that the culture of my youth isn't just gone, The literary part of it is dust, never to be seen again.

April 27, 2016

Touhou Peanuts!

This page has a lot of odd stuff from what might be a group project to create cross-breed art and comics featuring Touhou characters in Peanuts art style. Be warned: all the Peanuts stuff is G-rated, but there are other things which are NSFW. One gallery, for instance, is full of tentacle rape art.

Anyway, this is a sample of the good stuff:

(And the translations look to be Google Translate; understandable but a bit odd.)